Metal Casting!

Best for last, amiright?

I love metal casting. So basically, you can start with floral foam and sculpt it into anything you want. In this piece I sculpted it into a dog nose (or node as we call it around here because we're weirdos). Then I melted some wax and attached it to the back of the nose along with a short candle (e.g. the gate) and then a styrofoam cup to the candle. After that, you dip it into "unicorn blood" and silica several times a day for about a week. After that you put it in a kiln, and fire the piece which burns away the foam, candle and cup leaving the negative of what you sculpted. Since the gate is gone, it leaves an area in which you would pour your liquid metal into the void.

This is when I first started dipping, but the time I was finished you couldn't make out the nose, the gate or the cup, it kind of looked like a mushroom. I would dip it probably about 15 more times after this, you could only do it every 3-4 hours so it took quite awhile.

This is after it had been in the kiln and burned away everything inside.

Here it is after I poured aluminum into it. Unfortunately I didn't take a picture of the next part... taking a hammer and breaking the shell away. You're still left with some plaster that you have to get off with little picks, dental tools or basically anything that can fit into the crevices.

This is a little cleaned up, but I wanted some textural differences, so I spent about 15 hours filing and sanding it. I also used a dremel to define areas.

Here I am sanding the nubby gate area down. By the way, aluminum gets really effing hot, so you need to wear a glove!!

Here's the final piece. I welded it to an aluminum box that I painstakingly sandblasted.

Reflections

I learned a lot this semester in Digital Media, sometimes I struggled, other times I felt ahead of the game.

When we started out, I was feeling pretty comfortable, our first real assignment was the Urban Landscapes, taking photos via cell phone - right up my alley. I didn't do as well  the following week when we edited them. Reading the assignment, I thought she wanted us to go all out, and really change the photos... that wasn't really the case and my photos kind of suffered for it. I did way too much to them. I think overall, that assignment was a success though. We then used those photos to make our Animoto "video" slideshow. I am way too anal, so this stressed me out quite a bit. I really wanted to tell a story with the music, and I had difficulty lining up the starting and stopping points, but in the end, it turned out pretty well.

Then we moved on to Typologies... Remember my rock grid? This was my favorite assignment! Putting it together was a little tedious, but the end result was well worth it.

I can't believe I was able to create an original song, can you? I think I did a terrific job on it, considering I am not musically inclined in the least. I really enjoyed making my mashup video; my classmates didn't really understand the story I was trying to tell or even really understand about claymation. Seriously. Sometimes I feel like the biggest weirdo/outsider. My instructor understood for the most part, so that made me feel a little better.

I don't usually enjoy text based art, you know, some attention whore in comments somewhere makes a huge-ass picture and you have to scroll down forever to read the actual relevant comments... I did, however, like my self portrait. I was feeling very vulnerable at the time, and as my instructor said, sometimes that's the precise moment when the real honest creativity comes out.

We then moved on to Vector graphics, I didn't have much luck with this, neither did most of my class. I think it's a cool concept, and think there are other ways I would like to look into creating more, perhaps with a different program.

Then we made a website, not some dinky blog, a real honest to goodness website. I'm proud of that too, it always seem beyond my reach. I have to admit the software was pretty intuitive, so I can't take a whole lot of credit for it, but I still did it.

I liked this class a lot, unfortunately due to some personal issues I wasn't able to focus 100% of my attention to it, had I been able to, I would have enjoyed it more. I would recommend anybody to take this class at the University of Toledo under my instructor Phoebe Ballard.  She is kind, understanding and most importantly, hilarious.

Crafts in Art

Along with my Digital Media class, I took another class: Crafts in Art. It's primarily for Art Education Majors, but I love the instructor, Karen Roderick-Lingeman, it looked really interesting and most importantly, it fit into my schedule. Evening classes are hard to come by, I tell ya!

We worked with clay, we made a pinch pot and some "feelies" which are nothing, just shapes - that was really hard for me. I like having structure and a goal. We also had to make a museum inspired piece, I chose Cornwall Slate Circle which was created by Richard Long.

By now, you must know I'm obsessed with stones, rocks and natural formations. We, unfortunately, bonfired all of the pieces, and Miss Sensitive here can't manage to touch/photograph them. It's strange, I've been around bonfires with nothing... however, the smell of the clay pieces after being fired smells exactly like how my house smelled when it burned down when I was a kid. So they're in the garage, I'll put up some pictures of them after they've aired out a bit.

I also got to work on the potters wheel for the first time. I would love to do it again!

We also made paper! We used scrap paper, water and blenders. Easy peasy! Here are some examples.

My favorite project in the class came from something I didn't enjoy that much, actually. Weaving. We had to do a final project, whatever we wanted, as long as we weaved it. I had an idea, but couldn't find what I was looking for here... Being that I've gone back and forth to Iowa quite a bit this semester, it offered me the opportunity to look for the agricultural item I was looking for... I wanted an old egg basket, with lots of rust. I turned that into a lampshade and weaved in pages of my favorite childhood book, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.

Not a great shot of it, but you get the idea. (more rocks! and please excuse my messy dining room table)

Assemblage

Last spring I was lucky enough to work with Dewey Blocksma for an assemblage project in my form class. Assemblage art is basically finding stuff and finding ways to put it together.

If you've not heard of Dewey Blocksma before, you should check him out. He worked as a physician for some time but decided to quit and pursue his art career, he is an amazingly kind and smart person. He brought all kinds goodies for us to use.

Meet Sam.

His head is made from a bowl, wooden spoons, buttons, bobbers and wire. His body is is made from two tennis rackets, my lungs stress ball, yarn and electrical wire that was taken out of a broken stop light (and his little peeper is made from magazine beads). I attached him to a wooden board and covered that with strips of felt. 

While assemblage isn't my favorite way to create, I have a certain fondness for Sam - he was my first official art project in school. He kind of reminds me of a cross between Herbie from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Dobby from Harry Potter.

ArtPrize 2014

ArtPrize is an independently organized, international art competition where there are two $200,000 grand prize winners, one decided by public vote and the other by a panel of expert jurors; there are also eight $20,000 category awards given for two-dimensional, three-dimensional, time based, an installation pieces, judged in the same manner, with a total of $560,000 to be awarded to the winners. Artprize is located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a wonderful art friendly town in Western Michigan.

Upon arrival at the ArtPrize Hub, we were greeted by enthusiastic volunteers who gave us the event guide and a map, along with free magnets and pins. They had a nice gift shop available for those wanting to buy souvenirs. Although it must take an army to organize the nineteen day event, we were quite overwhelmed trying to figure out where the pieces we were most interested in seeing were located. I wish we had gone to see it earlier, instead of going on the day when the winners were announced. I felt that the sheer amount of people in every exhibit really took away from the experience.

I first heard about ArtPrize from a family member who posted a partial picture of one of the entries, Intersections by Anila Quayyum Agha on Instagram – I knew immediately I had to see this beautiful piece of art with my own eyes.  Only one other time in my life have I been so moved by something; when I walked into the room where it was installed, tears immediately came to my eyes. This piece is located at the Grand Rapids Art Museum in the [DIS]COMFORT ZONES which explores the way artists take risks and bush boundaries, whether through subject matter, process, point of view, they try to make the viewers come out of their comfort zone and see the world differently. The [DIS]COMFORT ZONE had pieces  with issues surrounding religion, cultural customs, war, danger, violence, vulnerability, as well as the body and identity.

Intersections is by far, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my entire life. I was so frustrated, because there were so many people in there; I just wanted to be along with it, to take in every detail. I love that not only is it beautiful, but because the artist hung a light inside, the whole room was bathed in the exquisite design. She created the piece from laser cut wood. She states the wooden frieze emulates a pattern from the Alhambra, which was poised at the intersection of history, culture and art and was a place where Islamic and Western discourses, met and co-existed in harmony and served as a testament to the symbiosis of difference, and her intent with this installation was to give substance to mutualism, exploring the binaries of public and private, light and shadow, and static and dynamic. It certainly opened up something inside of me, I want to learn how to laser cut wood, I want to create my own designs and follow in her footsteps.

I spent some time viewing Ingredients, a set of photographs by Amber Yeh, which was also in the [DIS]COMFORT ZONE at the GRAM. There were pictures of bones with mealworms crawling out of them, chicken feet, a black chicken as well as a pig’s ear and jawbone. Ms. Yeh is a first generation American with Chinese heritage; she was inspired from a desire to showcase how different cultures can influence our perception on the foods that we choose to consume. I think I understand what she was trying to say, as Americans would normally view the items in these pictures as garbage, while people in other cultures view them as a delicacy. She stated that she wanted to share her experiences with the viewer, but she also wanted to convey emotions of awe and disgust simultaneously.

Unfortunately we left before the awards ceremony, but I was delighted to hear that Anila Quayyum Agha won the Public Vote Grand Prize of $200,000 and split the Juried Grand Prize with Sonya Clark (who submitted the Haircraft Project which I did not see) each winning $100,000.

 

Intersections by Anila Quayyum Agha